The Resistance of Spinal Curves

There is a man who has done more for corrective chiropractic care importance, than he ever would have imagined.  Dr. Kampanji, not a chiropractor, nor a fan as far as I can tell.  Established some incredible principles with his research that are as sound as anything in research, and incredibly pro-chiropractic!  But not just any chiropractic, curve correction chiropractic stands shoulders above the rest when you read his work.

We have been focused on corrective chiropractic for 9 of the ten years HealthSprout has been around.  We have seen some incredible things as it relates to change in the spine, as well as disease and symptom reversal.  One thing for sure, to get full benefit, it takes time and continued effort.  And effort outside of the office cannot be avoided if you truly want change.

OK, so what does this Dr. Kampanji say?  Well, his research shows that resistance to forces both axial (straight down) and sheering (across the plane of the spine) is increased with more curves.  The spine when normal, is considered to have 5 curves in it.  The cervical (neck) curve, the thoracic (chest) curve, the lumbar (low back) curve, the tail bone curve, and the last one is the curve at the base of the skull rounding forward.  The last is seemingly the least important, as it doesn’t really seem to be a full curve anyways.  However, Kampanji’s work took that curve as an equally important piece of research (we focus on the atlas as the most important bone, and it is this bone that most directly influences the skull position).

So in his work, he discovered that the resistance was a function of the number of curves.  You square the number of curves then add one, to get to the “unit” measure of resistance.  So if there were only 1 curve, as what we would see in an early developing fetus, then the resistance is (1×1)+1= 2.  As that baby develops, the cervical curve is now started in utero, so it is (2×2)+1 = 5.  As a child emerges from the womb the cervical/occipital relationship is complete so now it is (3×3)+1 = 10.  As the child crawls both the sacral curve and the lumbar curves differentiated from each other, so in reality you jump past four curves and go to five, (5×5)+1 = 26.  A fully functioning spine with normal curvature is 13 times more resistant to stress than a simple c-curve.

When I began to wonder about the sheering stresses and HOW it could be resistant to sheering forces, I was immediately reminded that every other four legged animal on the planet primarily walks on all four legs, meaning that the forces on their spines are almost ENTIRELY sheering forces.  And they possess the same curvature.  Of course they usually don’t live as long as we do, which could be due to neurological degeneration when we consider the resistance might not be as much as it could be if the loading were different.  (I am obviously not an evolutionary biologist, however if those guys ever wanted to get a better guess why an ape would start to walk upright, I would argue that it would be because the axial loading on their spines would cause much less degeneration vs sheering.  Either way, their still missing another 10 to the 8th power of genetic change explanation, so I am comfortable as a creationist!)

I regress… sorry.  OK, so lets consider you.  If you sit at a computer for 15 years (the amount of time that it takes to reduce a cervical curve by 70% in the average person.  And you do nothing to restore both the cervical curve and to reduce the increased thoracic curve (rounding of the shoulders).  You have now taken yourself from a 26 resistance, to a 10.  By removing both occipital (skull) and cervical curves.  In addition, the increased curvature of the thoracic spine, though still a resistant curve, is causing neurological damage by stretching the spinal chord.

Drum roll time……………  your curves matter.  Don’t take them lightly.  Don’t take your traction lightly, don’t take head weighting lightly, don’t take your children’s spines lightly…. if they aren’t under care here, you should be asking yourself why not.  They do sit at desks more than anyone else in the world, and they do it enough to completely remove their curves.

Second – don’t expect overnight results, especially if you are still in the bad habit of poor posture.  Take steps to improve your posture and to build the strength to maintain it.  This is all way too important to ignore.

See you standing nice and tall, Be Well, God Bless!  – Dr. E